DREXEL UNIVERSITY: Architectural History of the Main Building

f ever a person can be said to have been born to his craft it was Joseph Wilson. 6 Four previous generations of Wilsons had been engineers, reaching back to the eighteenth century in Scotland. After graduating with a degree in civil engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Wilson took two years of post-graduate work in chemistry before joining the Pennsylvania Railroad staff, where he was quickly made Principal Engineer in charge of bridges. In the early 1870s, he entered the competition for the Main Building for the Centennial Exhibition with John McArthur, Jr. Although their vast glass and iron Gothic hall placed third, the engineering rationale of Wilson's design was powerfully apparent. 7 With the Centennial exhibit in danger of foundering on grandiose schemes and inadequate budgets, Wilson and Henry Petit were given the charge of designing and completing in eighteen months the main exhibit and machinery halls that were to cover nearly fifty acres. This they accomplished on budget and in time for the installation of exhibits on 1 January 1876. 8

Spurred by this triumph, in 1876 Wilson left the employ of the Pennsylvania Railroad to form a partnership with his brother John and with architect Henry Macomb, under the name of the Wilson Brothers. Through most of the nineteenth century, American architecture had been shaped by designers looking backward toward the European past while American engineers were spanning chasms, tunneling under rivers, and envisioning new structures that would free buildings from the mass and weight of masonry and permit them to reach toward the heavens. The Wilson Brothers proposed to combine planning, engineering, and architecture in recognition "of the changes which had taken place in the business of the country and believing that the time had arrived for combining the professions of engineering and architecture in such a manner that corporations and individuals could avail themselves of the best professional advice without having to maintain an expensive staff." 9 Though this combination is now well established, in the nineteenth century it was virtually unique.

The Wilson Brothers also made significant contributions to the rationalization of building construction. It was they who first supported masonry walls on a steel frame in 1881 for the Broad Street Station and who later added wind bracing to the steel frame of their 1888 addition to the Drexel Bank Building at Fifth Street. The daring of the Wilson Brothers' structural innovations was equaled by the logic of their planning and design. Where late Victorian designers had pushed masonry to its picturesque limits, the Wilson Brothers foresaw that modern linear construction materials were best served by regularity of form and consistency of plan. From that conclusion came the adaptation of the

ordered forms, if not necessarily the details, of classicism as the analog to the construction process. Hence the measured and regular character of the Main Building was rooted in the engineer's grid rather than the imported Beaux-Arts classicism that would sweep the country after the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

As the formal and aesthetic solution for a plan of a technical institute, one that addressed both the changing technology and character and the mass democracy of the industrializing and urbanizing America of the 1890s, the Wilson Brothers design was noteworthy. The building housed all of the functions of the entire institute under the same roof-from administration to eleven departments that required a gymnasium, workshops, laboratories, a technical museum, a large library, and classrooms. Indeed, with the exception of the dormitories, which are a product of Drexel's change to a residential campus in the twentieth century, all of the functions now scattered across the entire campus were once housed in the single building which served a community of nearly one thousand students and faculty. New functions have replaced old. Administrative offices have expanded into the library; the president's and provost's offices have replaced the museum and lecture hall; and the gymnasium on the fourth floor is now the home of the Department of Architecture.